Saturday, January 16, 2010

From Jonathan Chait (whose new TNR blog is excellent, by the way) comes this video of Scott Brown chortling while suggesting President Obama was born out of wedlock:

This is, Chait argues, a much more potent weapon against the Brown campaign than anything else the pathetic Coakley campaign has yet managed to produce:

By showing Brown endorsing a fringe right-wing pet theory (explanation here), it's more evidence of the fact that Brown is anything but the good government, uniter-not-a-divider moderate he pretends to be. That's the fundamental lie of his campaign that Coakley has been seeking (unsuccessfully, thus far) to expose. And on a visceral level, to watch him chortling as he calls Obama illegitimate is just gross and offensive.

I'm inclined to agree. There's nothing about Coakley I find particularly exciting (and there are certain aspects of her record that are concerning), but she's clearly the right choice to succeed the late Senator Kennedy - especially since health care reform could be hanging in the balance.

That's why her meandering, incoherent, almost unbelievably inept performance has been so infuriating. At this moment, the stakes are just too high for her to screw up. And the last thing the Senate needs is another classless idiotic right-winger. There's a bastard in that video, all right - but it's not the president. Hopefully the good people of the Bay State will keep him out of the U.S. Senate.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

While he was mistaken, he might have had in mind the fact that Obama was conceived out of wedlock...just a thought. Also, unless you plan on seducing an 18-year-old when you're 24 and already married, there's a further point to be raised about the character of BHO Sr.

But what relevance could that possibly have to anybody's view of the president? Even if that's what he was getting at, it's an entirely unnecessary swipe at the deceased parents of a major political figure. It has nothing to do with the policies or views of Barack Obama.

Not that any of this matters, since he's now senator-elect. And, for what it's worth, his victory speech was admirably classy.